Social Media | Cash for Questions: Research funding, policy and development

How can we help researchers get responses for web questionnaires?

A picture of an energy saving lightbulb — *Insert your own hilarious and inaccurate joke about how long energy saving lightbulbs take to warm up here*

I’ve had an idea, and I’d like you, the internet, to tell me if it’s a good one or not. Or how it might be made into a good one.

Would it be useful to set up a central list/blog/twitter account for ongoing research projects (including student projects) which need responses to an internet questionnaire from the general public? Would researchers use it? Would it add value? Would people participate?

Every so often, I receive an email or tweet asking for people to complete a research questionnaire on a particular topic. I usually do (if it’s not too long, and the topic isn’t one I consider intrusive), partly because some of them are quite interesting, partly because I feel a general duty to assist with research when asked, and partly because I probably need to get out more. The latest one was one which a friend and former colleague shared on Facebook. It was a PhD project from a student in her department about sun tanning knowledge and behaviour, and it’s here if you feel like taking part. Now this is not a subject that I feel passionately about, but perhaps that’s why it might be useful for the likes of me to respond.

I guess the key assumptions that I’m making are that there are sufficient numbers of other people like me who would be willing to spend a few minutes every so often completing a web survey to support research, and that nothing like this exists already. If there is, I’ve not heard about and I’d have thought that I would have done. But I’d rather be embarrassed now rather than later! Another assumption is that such a resource might be useful. I strongly suspect that any such resource would have a deeply atypical demographic – I’d imagine it would be mainly university staff and students. But I’d imagine that well designed research questionnaires would be asking sufficiently detailed demographic information to be able to factor this in. For some student projects where the main challenge can be quantity rather than variety, this might not even matter too much. I guess it depends what questions are being asked as part of the research.

I’ve not really thought this through at all yet. I would imagine that only projects which could be completed by anyone would be suitable for inclusion, or at least only projects where responses are invited from a broad range of people. Very specific projects probably wouldn’t work, and would make it harder for participants to find ones which they can do. Obviously all projects would need to have ethical approval from their institution. There would be an expectation that beneficiaries are prepared to reciprocate and help others in return. And clearly there has to be a strategy to tell people about it.

In practical terms, I’m thinking about either a separate blog or a separate page of this one, and probably a separate twitter account. Researchers could add details in a comment on a monthly blog post, and either tweet the account and ask for a re-tweet, or email me a tweet to send. Participants could follow the twitter feed and subscribe to the comments and blog.

So… what do you think? Please comment below (or email me if you prefer). Would this be useful? Would you participate? What have I missed? If I do set this up, how might I go about telling people about it?

New year’s wishes….

The new calendar year is traditionally a time for reflection and for resolutions, but in a fit of hubris I’ve put together a list of resolutions I’d like to see for the sector, research funders, and university culture in general. In short, for everyone but me. But to show willing, I’ll join in too.

No more of the following, please….

1. “Impactful”

Just…. no. I don’t think of myself a linguistic purist or a grammar-fascist, though I am a pedant for professional purposes. I recognise that language changes and evolves over time, and I welcome changes that bring new colour and new descriptive power to our language. While I accept that the ‘impact agenda’ is here to stay for the foreseeable future, the ‘impactful’ agenda need not be. The technical case against this monstrosity of a word is outlined at Grammarist, but surely the aesthetic case is conclusive in itself. I warn anyone using this word in my presence that I reserve the right to tell them precisely how annoyful they’re being.

2. The ‘Einstein fallacy’

This is a mistaken and misguided delusion that a small but significant proportion of academics appear to be suffering from. It runs a bit like this:
1) Einstein was a genius
2) Einstein was famously absent-minded and shambolic in his personal organisation
3) Conclusion: If I am or pretend to be absent-minded and shambolic , either:
(3a) I will be a genius; or
(3b) People will think I am a genius; or
(3c) Both.

I accept that some academics are genuinely bad at administration and organisation. In some cases it’s a lack of practice/experience, in others a lack of confidence, and I accept that this is just not where their interests and talent lies. Fair enough. But please stop being deliberately bad at it to try to impress people. Oh, you can only act like a prima donna if you have the singing skills to back it up…

3) Lack of predictability in funding calls

Yes, I’m looking at you, ESRC. Before the comprehensive spending review and all of the changes that followed from that, we had a fairly predictable annual cycle of calls, very few of which had very early autumn deadlines. Now we’re into a new cycle which may or may not be predictable, and a lot of them seem to be very early in the academic year. Sure, let’s have one off calls on particular topics, but let’s have a predictable annual cycle for everything else with as much advance notice as possible. It’ll help hugely with ‘demand management’ because it’ll be much easier to postpone applications that aren’t ready if we know there will be another call. For example, I was aware of a couple of very strong seminar series ideas which needed further work and discussion within the relevant research and research-user communities. My advice was to start that work now using the existence of the current call as impetuous, and to submit next year. But we’ve taken a gamble, as we don’t know if there will be another call in the future, and you can’t tell me because apparently a decision has yet to be made.

4) Lazy “please forward as appropriate” emails

Stuff sent to me from outside the Business School with the expectation that I’ll just send it on to everyone. No. Email overload is a real problem, and I write most of my emails with the expectation that I have ten seconds at most either to get the message across, or to earn an attention extension. I mean, you’re not even reading this properly are you? You’re probably skim reading this in case there’s a nugget of wit amongst the whinging. Every email I sent creates work for others, and every duff, dodgy, or irrelevant email I send reduces my e-credit rating. I know for a fact that at least some former colleagues deleted everything I sent without reading it – there’s no other explanation I can think of for missing two emails with the header including the magic words “sabbatical leave”.

So… will I be spending my e-credit telling my colleagues about your non-business school related event which will be of interested to no-one? No, no, and most assuredly no. I will forward it “as appropriate”, if by “appropriate” you mean my deleted items folder.

Sometimes, though, a handful of people might be interested. Or quite a lot of people might be interested, but it’s not worth an individual email. Maybe I’ll put it on the portal, or include it in one of my occasional news and updates emails. Maybe.

If you’d like me to do that, though, how about sending me the message in a form I can forward easily and without embarrassment? With a meaningful subject line, a succinct and accurate summary in the opening two sentences? So that I don’t have to do it for you before I feel I can send it on. There’s a lovely internet abbreviation – TL:DR – which stands for Too Long: Didn’t Read. I think its existence tells us something.

5) People who are lucky enough to have interesting, rewarding and enjoyable jobs with an excellent employer and talented and supportive colleagues, who always manage to find some petty irritants to complain about, rather than counting their blessings.

What would wholesale academic adoption of social media look like?

Last week, the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog was asking for its readers and followers to nominate their favourite academic tweeters. This got me thinking. While that’s a sensible question to ask now, and one that could create a valuable resource, I wonder whether the question would make as much sense if asked in a few years time?

The drivers for academics (and arguably academic-related types like me) to start to use twitter and to contribute to a blog are many – brute self-promotion; desire to join a community or communities; to share ideas; to test ideas; to network and make new contacts; to satisfy the impact requirements of the research funder; and so on and so forth. I think most current PhD students would be very well advised to take advantage of social media to start building themselves an online presence as an early investment in their search for a job (academic or otherwise). I’d imagine that a social media strategy is now all-but-standard in most ESRC ‘Pathways to Impact’ documents. Additionally, there are now many senior, credible, well-established academic bloggers and twitterers, many of whom are also advocates for the use of social media.

So, what would happen if there was a huge upsurge in the number of academics (and academic-relateds) using social media? What if, say, participation rates reach about 20% or so? Would the utility of social media scale, or would the noise to signal ratio be such that its usefulness would decrease?

This isn’t a rhetorical question – I’ve really no idea and I’m curious. Anyone? Any thoughts?

I guess that there’s a difference between different types of social media. I have friends who are outside the academy and who have Twitter accounts for following and listening, rather than for leading or talking. They follow the Brookers and the Frys and the Goldacres, and perhaps some news sources. They use Twitter like a form of RSS feed, essentially.

But what about blogging, or using Twitter to transmit, rather than to receive? If even 10% of academics have an active blog, will it still be possible or practical to keep track of everything relevant that’s written. In my field, I think I’ve linked to pretty much every related blog (see links in the sidebar) in the UK, and one from Australia. In certain academic fields it’s probably similarly straightforward to keep track of everyone significant and relevant. If this blogging lark catches on, there will come a point at which it’s no longer possible for anyone to keep up with everything in any given field. So, maybe people become more selective and we drop down to sub-specialisms, and it becomes sensible to ask for our favourite academic tweeters on non-linear economics, or something like that.

On the other hand, it might be that new entrants to the blogging market will be limited and inhibited by the number already present. Or we might see more multi-author blogs, mergers etc and so on until we re-invent the journal. Or strategies that involve attracting the attention and comment of influential bloggers and the academic twitterati (a little bit of me died inside typing that, I hope you’re happy….). Might that be what happens? That e-hierarchies form (arguably they already exist) that echo real world hierarchies, and effectively squeeze out new entrants? Although… I guess good content will always have a chance of ‘going viral’ within relevant communities.

Of course, it may well be that something else will happen. That Twitter will end up in the same pile as MySpace. Or that it simply won’t be widely adopted or become mainstream at all. After all, most academics still don’t have much of a web 1.0 presence beyond a perfunctory page on their Department website.

That’s all a bit rambly and far longer than I meant it to be. But as someone who is going to be recommending the greater use of social media to researchers, I’d like to have a sense of where all this might be going, and what the future might hold. Would the usefulness of social media as an academic communication, information sharing, and networking tool effectively start to diminish once a certain point is reached? Or would it scale?